Early research in western contexts finds evidence of online participation leading to political engagement. We test this hypothesis in a nonwestern campaign context. We discuss India’s complex “hybrid media system,” political parties, leaders, and issues in the 2014 national election that saw more use of digital information channels by all parties, and more so by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the young Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) than the incumbent Indian National Congress (INC). We hypothesize that online engagement and, specifically, sharing of campaign information is a significant predictor of political engagement in the campaigns of each of these three parties. Our dependent variable is a scale of engagement in campaign activities. Independent variables include campaign interest, issue salience, exposure to outdoor party publicity, attention to political information in various traditional media, party contact and sharing information with others (both measured face-to-face and electronically), and controlling for age, gender, and education. Our models, based on survey data from Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, show that party contact, sharing campaign information, and campaign interest are significant predictors of engagement while the other items vary in terms of significance.
The rise of misinformation often circulated in various social media platforms has not only raised concerns among the policymakers and civil society groups, but also among citizens. Drawing upon a cross-sectional survey ( n = 1,013) among English-language internet users in India, this paper tries to identify factors that affect concerns for online misinformation among citizens and how online news participation is affected by the rise of misinformation. After controlling for gender, age, education and income, we found that WhatsApp use, party identification and trust in news are positively associated with the concern for misinformation. Similarly, partisans are more likely to engage with news online. While Facebook and Twitter use are positively associated with online news sharing, the use of WhatsApp is not significant. The empirical evidence adds new insights to the literature on misinformation and online news engagement from the world’s largest democracy.
This paper takes an alternative approach to understanding theory as description. New theoretical propositions and knowledge practices need to grow out of the comparisons between descriptions, especially comparisons between the Southern cases. Using China and India as two cases, this paper reviews the descriptions of communication technology in the two countries and compares the descriptions. Through such comparisons, the paper concludes that the communication technology studies on China and India provide three theoretical insights: firstly, the state-society relationship shapes communication technology; secondly, the increasing pluralization or hybridity of the cyberspace shapes how communication technology is used; and lastly, it is the quest for finding one's self (or selves) in a Chinese/Indian modernity that could provide references to other contexts.
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